this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Well you can always pay someone to read it for you. Blind people do that.
Are any of these books public domain? If so the print version could be eligible for inclusion at Project Guttenberg. PG has very specific docs about eligibility for this. You could probably get a scan from archive.org if you don't have one. You would have to clean up the OCR by hand.
Then it would eligible to be requested from the volunteer (human) readers who have been pumping out Libra audio books for years at LibriVox.
Recently I saw Gutenberg has a collab. They are producing and distributing Libre guidebooks generated by AI. I believe I read on one of the pages they have 4000 done. I haven't tried it out but I guess I should.
I assume this is also a great benefit as fertilizer down at the old AI content farm which is otherwise totally run over with reddit shitposts.
If anyone tries it let me know how it goes.
The books I specifically mentioned are now public domain as they are old enough and librevox is where I actually started my audiobook (and books in general) journey. One of them is on there but it is only the second book of what is a 5 or more book series which is kinda frustrating.
The volunteer readers are very hit and miss however and I find that more than half are just not listenable for me due to different reasons from poor actual recordings, poor reading ability by the reader with excessive pauses added "errs and ummms" to mispronunciation of words constantly. These are pedantic reasons maybe and I throw no shade over it to the people that have volunteered their time to read these books but I just can't listen to them personally for the same reason I could never get through any amount of time with a robotic text to speech program of the past.
I'll look into the project Gutenberg thing however, thanks for making me aware of it and see what is up with that :)
Totally true about the librivox readers. They are doing their best. :) There are some total gems in there. But I have definitely given up on a few of them. OTOH I have given up on professionally read audiobooks too for all sorts of reasons.
Absolutely, I love some of the librevox readers and have found new books I enjoyed immensely just from seeing what other things the ones I enjoyed had read, i found it a good way to find new books for a while because usually they are reading other books they personally enjoy that are similar to the one I had looked for initially.
Likewise just because they are "professionally read" doesn't make them good by default. Some peoples voices or accents just don't sit well with me trying to listen to them which is no fault of their own and personal preference on my part but some are just plain bad and I can't believe someone paid them for that work and found it acceptable enough to release it into the wider world :D